Amy Pond & the Gallifreyan Treat

To be honest, this illustration deserves a full colour treatment, but for now a bit of blue will have to do. Like Samir I too have vague memories of the old Dr. Who TV series, but the new ones have not made much of an impression on me (and some of them have been downright off-putting). Consequently, I have not seen any episodes featuring the latest Doctor or his comely new companion Amy Pond (played Karen Gillan), but such things need never be a barrier to drawing such things.

I did use a reference image for this, and am fairly satisfied that I was able to preserve some kind of vague likeness while keeping it within my current drawing style. I’m usually crap at drawing from pictures.

Varying line weights are a great way to make an illo look better. You can achieve it in two ways:

1) The way I used to do it, which is to use a fineliner pen (i.e. a Pilot or any one of those ‘point’ pens) to do the inks in even lines, then draw in the extra weights and fill them in with black.

2) Get a brush pen, or what I’m currently using, a calligraphy pen. Both are from Daiso; the brush pen is harder to control, the calligraphy marker is pretty forgiving (but doesn’t have as much weight range). The latter is unfortunately not easily identifiable in the package (well, it must be perfectly well marked in Japanese, just not in English).

I’d suggest method 1 for now. I used it successfully for years before trying out brush pens, but I would also recommend buying the latter to practice now.

(Of course, in the end having a bunch of pens does help. Most of this was done with the calligraphy pen since it’s a human figure (and that ‘organic’ line helps), but I’ll often use three or four different ones, from fineliners and markers to tiny 0.05 technical pens)

Brush pens do indeed have a steep learning curve (which I’ve never managed to get over). I’ve found a few here that are double-ended, i.e. have a large sized tip and a more manageable small-sized tip for fine details. The calligraphy/signature marker I’m using is halfway between brush pen and marker — the tip is much tougher so you can really press the shit out of it without the line going crazy. But, I’ve never seen a pen like that before or anywhere else. 🙁